Notice how short Loops URLs are?
https://loops.video/v/d86zgftFT9
Do you know why and how?
Great URLs never change.
But usernames can.
Not including usernames in URLs means we can properly support username changes without breaking federation!
How we do this is a combination of snowflake ids (hard to guess, to prevent enumeration) and hash ids (to base encode huge ids to shorten them).
We can easily decode and encode 18 digit numbers into 10 chars.
Also, they federate ✨